The number and variety of wireless terminal devices, such as mobile telephones, wireless-enabled laptop computers and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) with wireless communication capabilities, self-service kiosks and two-way pagers are rapidly increasing. Software applications that run on these devices increase their utility. For example, a mobile phone may include an application that retrieves the weather for a range of cities, or a PDA may include an application that allows a user to shop for groceries. These software applications take advantage of wireless connectivity to a data network (such as the Internet) in order to provide timely and useful services to users.
A typical wireless application may include more than one hundred different messages exchanged between the wireless terminal device and a server (e.g. a network gateway server, back-end server or web services server) facilitating the application.
Traditionally, software developers have had to manually create message components, data components, and corresponding primary keys in their application, and write script codes to process related messages (e.g. create, update, delete data components). This prior-art approach is time-consuming and furthermore requires significant time and effort to debug the code for minor misspellings, syntax errors, problematic variable definitions or other logical inconsistencies. As programmers end up devoting time and energy to coding mechanics and syntax, they inevitably do not concentrate fully on the design and implement application functionalities.
Accordingly, it would be highly desirable to provide a method and system for assisted visual development of incoming messages to facilitate and expedite application development.
It will be noted that throughout the appended drawings, like features are identified by like reference numerals.